A Very Noisy Silence: British War Films of the 1920s

Published September 14, 2017

Written by Mark Connelly.

Silence is absolutely crucial to our remembrance of the Great War. The thousands of sepia images we have of men queuing up to enlist, marching away to war, slogging through mud encumbered with kit, of women and children reading casualties lists pasted to billboards are curiously hypnotic due to their arresting power framed by, and etched into, the sepulchre silence of the tomb. As we know, everyone in the Great War is dead. In fact, the way we perceive it, they were preordained-doomed-dead in 1914 long before the first shots of the armies had been fired. Never such innocence again is synonymous with the crushing weight of silence; the silence of Armistice Day and Remembrance Sunday; the supposed silence of all memory – ‘dad never spoke about the war’ or ‘mum never spoke about dad or how he died’. ‘There we stand, alone in the world, mute before the meaning of the events that befell our generation’, as R.H. Mottram wrote in his article, ‘In Those Two Minutes’.

The new toy of twentieth-century communication, the cinematograph camera, played a huge role in recording the stuff of history and translating it into memory. Hundreds of thousands of feet of film were shot during the war capturing activities at the front, immediately behind it, and on the home fronts. In the years after the war, it also captured the creation of remembrance rituals as it recorded war memorial unveilings and the standing-still-silence of Armistice Day itself. These early films are, of course, almost universally known as ‘silent cinema’, and yet this is a misnomer, for silent films were almost never, ever silent. At the very least there would be a piano accompaniment; in medium-sized cinemas small bands were employed, and the largest – so-called ‘super cinemas’ – something akin to a full orchestra. Many cinemas also employed specialist teams to create appropriate sound effects enhancing massively the experience of cinema-goers. Also, and very unlike sound films, the reliance on intertitles meant there was not the same expectation on audiences to sit in silence. With no dialogue to keep track off aurally, audiences were free to shout out, clap, sing and weep. Cinema must have been far more like the music hall, pantomime or Victorian melodrama with their sense of reciprocity between stage and audience.

All of this has significant implications for the way people digested war films in the 1920s. In the British Empire, the leading exponent of war film production was the British Instructional Films company. Dedicated to producing accurate reconstructions of Great War battles, it made a series of increasingly-lavish interpretations with the full co-operation of the War Office and Admiralty. Starting with relatively modest productions in 1921 with The Battle of Jutland, followed by a film about Allenby’s victories in Palestine, Armageddon, in 1923, buoyed by their huge success, the company went on to produce far grander scale efforts. In 1924 Zeebrugge was released, neatly coinciding with its dramatic tableau vivant interpretation at the Wembley Empire Exhibition; 1925 saw the biggest box-office hit of its output, Ypres. A year later Mons was released to equally appreciative audiences, and a year after that its last venture before the introduction of sound film was the cinematic masterpiece, The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands.

In all of these films the sonic was absolutely crucial. For The Battles of Coronel and Falkland Islands, the New Gallery Cinema in Lower Regent Street special effects team had shovels and coal to replicate the stoking of the boilers, indoor fireworks for the explosives, and heavy metal chains to replicate the sound of cables and anchors. Police were called to a south London cinema at a screening of Mons as a result of its team releasing thousands of blank rounds to replicate the sound of battle. As noted, music was crucial for all films, but in terms of British Instructional Films’ output, Ypres leant itself more fully to an emotive accompaniment. As might be expected, the wartime songs were played throughout, which had a tremendous effect on audiences. In Adelaide people joined in and sang along with the orchestra, as they did in Toronto. G.A. Atkinson, reporting on the premiere for the Daily Express, saw the séance-like potential of the songs to create a communion between the audience, the screen and the dead, stating that the music would fill the Marble Arch Pavilion with ghosts. Sure enough, the first public screening witnessed the audience whistling along with ‘Colonel Bogey’, ‘Mademoiselle from Armentières’ and ‘Take Me Back to Dear OId Blighty’ among others. One man ‘was visibly overcome, and he was led away after the performance, crying as if his heart would break’. Many accounts remark on this emotional effect of Ypres, which must at least in part, have been inspired by the music’s ability to break down the barrier between watching and absorbing as an individual and viewing as a group experience. Atkinson witnessed a middle-aged man at the trade premiere take out his handkerchief and make ‘suspicious noises in his throat… “I was in that” he whispered’.

Just as Mottram noted about the silence of Armistice Day, when a torrent thoughts might fill a person’s mind, the silence of cinema was actually rather cacophonous. And, in total contradiction to those commentators focused on high culture who claim that there was a silence about the war until the 1920s, silent cinema shows us that the total opposite is, in fact, the case.

Mark Connelly is Professor of Modern British History at the University of Kent and the author of Celluloid War Memorials (Exeter University Press, 2016). Image Credit: CC by Paul Townsend/Flickr

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The Centre for the History of War, Media and Society

The study of war and propaganda is well established at the University of Kent. The Centre for the History of War, Media and Society is interested in different types of conflict, from trench warfare and geopolitical standoffs to guerrilla and terrorist tactics and civil defence initiations. It also considers the application of technology and medicine in warfare, the impact of the media on public opinion, along with the increasing importance of the home front in contemporary warfare. A further strand of research is the legacy and memory of war in the twentieth century.

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11/03/2019

The Centre for the Study of War, Media and Society will host the book launch of British Exploitation of German Science and Technology, 1943-1949, by Charlie Hall and published by Routledge, on 21 March 2019. It will take place in the Rutherford College Rogers Room on the University of Kent campus from 6pm.

22/01/2019

Flanders House (Belgian Embassy) will host the launch of Ypres, co-written by Mark Connelly and Stefan Goebel and published by Oxford University Press on 22 January 2019.

02/10/2018

The Centre welcomes Professor Paul Sharp from the University of Minnesota Duluth as visiting professor in 2018/19. Professor Sharp will give a paper on ‘Bad Leaders and Good Diplomacy’ in the School of History Research Seminar at 4pm on 21 November 2018.

04/05/2018

Linsey Robb and Juliette Pattinson (eds.), Men, Masculinities and Male Culture in the Second World War (London, 2018).

In this new edited volume, Linsey Robb (Northumbria University) and Juliette Pattinson (Head of the School of History at the University of Kent) bring together collected essays exploring British masculinities and male culture during the Second World War.

23/04/2018

David Budgen, British Children’s Literature and the First World War: Representations since 1914 (London: Bloomsbury, 2018).

2018 sees the publication of British Children’s Literature and the First World Warby Dr David Budgen, Associate Lecturer in the School of History and member of the centre for War, Media and Society, University of Kent.

18/02/2017

Details for the ‘Body and Soil: Corporeality and Territoriality in Great War Europe’ International Conference to be held at the University of Kent between the 4th and 5th of May 2017 can be found on the ‘Events Page.’

24/09/2016
Stefan Goebel and Jerry White co-edited a special issue, titled ‘London and the First World War’ in The London Journal. Their introduction is free available via http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/03058034.2016.1216758